those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me
Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative. Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level of drama, just as in a reality TV show.
Real economics is boring for most people and the only way to make it attractive to the masses is to be sensationalistic. Mainstream financial news has never been good and never will be.
Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".
> Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".
You're not wrong, but you could replace "economics" with almost anything and it would still be a valid (and usually meaningful, although context matters) statement.
> Real engineering includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to [be] considered "real engineering"
I mean how else are you going to push back against the clueless PMs who can't be bothered to learn how to code?
> Real art includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real art"
Of course, how else do you expect to create value for something unique that is not easily priced by the market?
> Real science includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to be considered "real science"
I'd say this accurately describes academia. Honestly this last one is eerily insightful.
Facts are supposed give rise to an emergent narrative. That is good journalism. What we have in 2021, are people curating facts and only including those that fit their pre-determined narrative.
While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model leaves something out: that journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives, based not on values or ideology, but on virality and cognitive/emotional stickiness. "Person X is a hero" and "Person X is a villain" will both tend to outcompete nuance ("Person X is flawed but well-intentioned and has done both good and bad things.").
journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives
Those aren't arbitrary. They are often pre-decided by higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list. People have been calling this stuff out online for years! Funnily enough, it stays out of the consciousness of normal people, because it's never covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory, so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and kinda disgusting.
No dispute: journalistic institutions are power concentrations that invite pressure from all sorts of private interests, in addition to prevailing internal groupthink. (In the Twitterati era, I'd say the latter problem is both top-down and bottom-up, and they compound much more often than they cancel out.)
What I'm saying is that even if one corrects for ideological motives, obsequiousness to power, etc., one is still left with an independent incentive towards maximizing eyeballs, and therefore torturing complex realities into digestible narratives, and that can be a problem in and of itself.
Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade. Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough time to make the alternate route a good idea.
These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting phenomenon in itself.
I am not sure the projections were unrealistic. The full picture simply wasn't known or even knowable. The best likely scenario with the known information was a few hours; the worst likely scenario was weeks.
Boring, facts and research based industry/financial news exists. But it can cost upwards of a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. If you want real news, you'll have to pay for it.
What are your recommendations for real news? I've heard FT, WSJ, and the economist, and am looking to finally commit and sign up instead of relying on free. You get what you pay for is true in this case, and I don't wanna put drama based narratives in my head, which form my perception of the world.
- Good if you care about mostly business in the developed world (Europe and US).
- Really, really, really good features, solid visualisation, and a fairly wide breath of writers in terms of opinions.
The Economist:
- Very opinionated, but extremely diverse coverage of lots of different parts of the world (I've never come across a better English language source on Africa, for example).
- Weekly, so if you only want to read news occasionally, it may work for you
WSJ:
- Pretty good coverage overall, the US business/tech coverage is much better (in depth) than the FT's
- Their opinion section is like the NYT in bizarro-world.
In terms of price FT > Economist > WSJ.
It really depends on what you're looking for, but the FT works for me as a daily driver (I ended my subscription to the Economist, and only signed up for the WSJ about a month ago).
Thank you, this is insightful. I fall squarely between FT & Economist, so I may end up subscribing to both, but given Economist is weekly, this might be a better match for my lifestyle.
I meant more industry specific news rather than general news. Organizations that cover niche topics, usually catering towards businesses or investors rather than the general public. In my case it's things like Covenant Review, Xtract Research, Debtwire, Reorg, etc. There are likely similar services catering to shipping and logistics that would provide better analysis on this situation than most general news organizations.
principle agent problem and always has been ... what’s stunning is that civilization manages to create some amount of value despite this ... imagine what the world would be like if humans learned how to actually cooperate at scale and maximize long term in an antifragile way
In my bedroom as a young teenager I used to think a worldwide event which affected every person equally, like finding life in another planet, would surely usher in a new era of common interest and a shared view that we're all but the same thing: human.
I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for breaking it), selfishness wins.
The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.
I had high hopes for a pro-social silver lining around the pandemic as well, but it's simply too distant and indirect (especially given that the outcomes ranged so widely to those infected: from death, to the worst flu ever, to no symptoms at all).
What gives me hope is the fact that our species has altruism at all, even if it isn't as widespread as we would like; it's evidence that cooperation is at least sometimes a competitive advantage. Looking at nature, we see both symbiosis and predation as successful survival strategies. The tension between Good and Evil we will have with us always; the bad news is that Good will never definitively win, but the good news is that neither will Evil.
> I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for breaking it), selfishness wins.
It's not the baker empathy that brings you bread, but his greed
> The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.
The pandemic makes me hope more people will see governments for what they are: restricting their freedoms for no good reasons, so it's better to starve the beast.
Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking heads are usually pushing some sort of narrative. Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level of drama, just as in a reality TV show.